The Rose-Vine
by calyxofawildflower
Summary: Young Treavor Pendleton attends his first high society party and finds all his hopes laid in the lap of Waverly Boyle.


"Go on, Treavor," Morgan said over the rim of his glass, "ask her to dance. She's been without a partner all evening. Do you really think she's holding out for anyone else?"

The hall of the Boyle manor was alight with colour—so much that it made the youngest Pendleton squint into his drained wineglass, the bottom stained with swirling purple sediment. Music trilled harshly over the marble halls and Treavor, standing in the oak-panelled smoking room of the manor, pulled hard at the scratching collar of his coat, as his small, nervous eyes twitched back and forth as he looked to the doubled image of his older brothers, standing over him with matching smiles. They had chased away his valet and so he stood exposed to the familiar voice of the pair of them sneering their encouragements while he attended his first event of his first season.

"You know the custom, don't you?" Custis said into his ear, one hand perched on his shoulder like the talon of a flesh-eating bird. A cigarette bobbed at the corner of his mouth.

"The lady lies waiting until she's asked to dance," Morgan answered his twin. Beyond the pair of them, Waverly sat alone with her hands neatly folded in her lap and her long, thin neck bent forward as if she were a young plant deprived of light.

"She's refused every offer of the evening. I saw her do it. Lord Estermont was very displeased. She's waiting for _someone_, Treavor. She can't be _that_ frigid."

"Don't you know who she's waiting for? The entire party knows."

"I've seen her glance at you. You slunk away when you were announced at the door—she was _disappointed_."

"She's been waiting for you all night. Perhaps all year." Morgan came close to his ear for this whispered taunt. Treavor flinched as his brother snatched away his empty glass.

"I—I can't—There's no way to be sure—"

"Go _on_, Treavor," Morgan said impatiently, leaning in to face his younger brother as he braced himself against the wall, a hand beside Treavor's ear. "She's been without a partner for the entire evening. It would be rude of you to leave a lady waiting. You're a _gentleman_, after all."

"But I can't—" he began, but Custis took him roughly by the arm and dragged him from the corner, shoving his lank and spindly body towards the crowd. The other guests looked up from their glasses and conversations for a brief moment and Treavor, his sallow cheeks tinged red, stood straight and anxiously touched the jewel that held his cravat in place.

Waverly looked up to him from her seat as he approached with stuttering footsteps. He bowed in a sharp, overemphasised movement, again clutching at his throat as he straightened and trembled with the words that stuck in his chest.

"Lady Waverly," he began, too quietly, a long breath between the words, "would you give me the—the honourof joining me in the next dance?"

She did not look at him. Her hands, delicate, were laden with rings; her hair was swept to the nape of her neck in a bright coil of twisted yellow strands. Treavor trembled, his shoulders shaking sporadically. At length Waverly turned her eyes on him, bright, distant, and he felt as though he beheld the limitless sea and his stomach churned at the emptiness he found there.

"I would be glad to, Treavor," she answered, and rose to take his hand. He nearly jumped at her movement, and her fingers hung hooked in the air for him for a moment before he gathered the sense to offer her his bent arm.

"Waverly—" he breathed as he drew close, but she silenced him as she pulled him to her side and laid her pale cheek against his shoulder. He felt the rise and fall of her breast against his arm.

"The music is Tyvian," she said idly as she urged him gently towards the dancers, "do you know their dances?"

"I—well—I'm afraid not," Treavor answered, and hesitated at the edge of the circle as the musicians paused to draw their strings to a new tuning. The dancers broke and formed lines; Waverly took him to stand opposite her along the row.

"I'll teach you," she said, and gave him one of her rare smiles. "Like when we were children. Do you remember?"

"I will never forget," he said with keen honesty. Waverly smiled with her white teeth, and held out her hands to him.

"They are much like ours—surprisingly civilised, the Tyvian court—not like those horrid Morley reels where everyone changes partners every half-minute." Delicately she plucked up one of his hands by the wrist and laid it behind her, at her shoulder blade, while her other hand pressed its stiff, chill fingers to his palm. He felt a bead of sweat slip down the nape of his neck, beneath his collar, as she drew close. "Like this," she whispered, and with a gentle nudge she spurred him into a gangling step which he followed, the music coming to his ears as a whining noise that lacked step or comprehension, his mind streaming with the tinny sounds of the strings pulled taut to breaking.

She squeezed his palm as he trod on her foot. A muttered apology fell from his lips as he tried to keep them in the shifting rows of dancers that moved in tandem, aligned, turning together with the airy grace that Treavor tried to force his sharp limbs to follow. Gritting his teeth, his brow creased, he fell back into the lines with her at her quiet, easing direction; she nudged his knees with her thigh, or urged his shoulders straight with a press of her fingertips. Her eyes were cast down in an image of coy shyness but he knew that she kept watch on their timing so that he could stand straight and catch the glowering looks of his brothers who watched from the corner of the room. His steps became measured and firm. She followed—the music changed pace, and she turned to him with eyes alight.

"We part, now—listen for the steps," she said, and slipped from his arms. She turned and curtsied to the women on either side of her; Treavor turned to bow to the lords who, on rising, watched him with a curious eye that made Treavor wince. He turned back to Waverly, who approached him now in the locked steps of the music's tremulous beat, his breath catching again as he moved to take her hands. She glanced to the other dancers—Treavor quickly mirrored their movements, turning her in a series of quick steps, arms raised.

Waverly twisted before him, their fingertips brushing together, and he saw her smile flash before his eyes and her laughter sounded with the music and he, too, laughed and smiled. The song came to a short and startled end and the row of dancers came to their last round but before she could complete her turn Treavor's arm caught around her waist and she, breathless, stilled against his chest. Their eyes locked, the other dancers spinning in their pliant movements, and Treavor felt the tilt of the room as it rolled with his heart, beating against her, her eyes bright and clouded like the river sweating steam. He breathed. Her fingers, flat and stiff against his palm, loosened and carefully twined with his.

"Shall we—go to the balcony?" she asked, her voice coming to him like a wave gently lapping at the shore. He nodded; lead behind her by the hand, she drew him through the parting dancers to the wide, window-lined door which opened to the summer air.

An intoxicating surge of the heavy scent of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the suffocating interior of the manor; a sweet vertigo seized him. They bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the balustrade of the balcony, the vine twisting up the walls, the flowers themselves too luxuriant, their huge whorls of plush petals obscene in their excess, outrageous in their implications. They stifled the stench that rose from the canal below. They were some strain, Waverly explained, breaking from the hold of his hand and running a trembling fingertip over the inner bud of a late-blooming flower, brought from Pandyssia, crossed with the natural Gristol roses that grew outside Dunwall. Esma used them to lure young students from the Academy to study her botany; Treavor laughed, nervously, at this—Waverly only looked to him and he quieted suddenly, wringing his hands, and she turned to glance over her shoulder to the city beyond. She glittered before the encroaching darkness; her cheeks were flushed red by their dancing, her fingertips idly splaying the petals of a rose to reveal its writhing core. It stained her fingers yellow, her lips pursing in displeasure.

"I can't find a gardener in the city who can tear up that vine. It keeps growing back. Horrid things. Putrid," she said, and grasped the bloom in her hand, twisting its somnolent petals from its stem and tossing the torn and crumpled things into the canal below. Treavor moved to stand beside her as she turned to watch the summer sky blacken into night. The peaked roofs of the Estate district looked, against the horizon, like an open maw, dark teeth stretched in even rows, devouring the day.

"The whole city is disgusting." Her voice had lowered; Treavor leaned to listen. "Filthy. Would that I could escape Dunwall."

There was silence; the music inside had stopped, paused to allow the dancers their breath and their wine. A warm breeze stirred the flowers and Treavor reached to lay his hand beside hers on the balustrade. When his fingers brushed the back of her hand Waverly flinched and pulled away—she turned to him with wide eyes, as though surprised by his presence. He felt a tremor in his chest, the usual spasm of pain to which he had grown so accustomed.

"Are you enjoying the party, Treavor?" She asked with the flat tone of a hostess; Treavor only nodded, watching as she crumbled the rose pollen in her hands, avoiding her eyes which he felt upon him. He fought the urge to droop his shoulders and stand, mawkish, before her. Waverly slipped a hand beneath her lapel and drew a long cigarette which she held delicately between her fingers—she watched him expectantly before he started and pulled his lighter from his coat pocket, sparking it after a few stuttering attempts. His hand trembled, the muscles of his body pulled tight by their dance; she stilled him, placing her palm against his wrist, her eyes gleaming above the trembling flame.

"I'm sorry, I—" he began, watching the heavy cinder of her cigarette as she brought it to her lips, "I wanted to ask you to dance earlier, but—"

"Why didn't you?" she asked. Treavor writhed under her gaze.

"I, well—I didn't want to upset— well, ah, my brothers—"

"Your brothers are brutes."

Her voice was toneless but the youngest Pendleton looked to her with the boyish excitement of transgression. He was again little Treavor, jealous, snivelling, vindicated at thirteen by this bright, beautiful thing that had come into their home and chose his cloying attentions over the atavistic gravity of the twins, the heirs. The memories always came to him as if he had been at some lower vantage, looking up at her as she glanced kindly down, stooping to kiss her gloved hands, bowing as she entered the room, placing his head in her lap as they sat beneath one of the large trees on the grounds of his family's estate. The twins had chased the pair of them inside—always disrupting the moments he had with her as though they, too, noticed the change she affected in him.

"They are," he said quietly, his painful stuttering forgotten. She smiled—rare, bright—with a soft sigh that dragged a veil of smoke before her eyes. Her expression slipped away as quickly as it had come, like a breeze fluttering the surface of a lake.

"They frightened me," she said, "when we summered at Pendleton Hall. Do you remember?" Her eyes were full of sadness; Treavor tensed with the urge to touch her, grasp her hand, place a palm to her cool cheek. Instead he only stood and wrung his ringed fingers.

"They were always very cruel," he said, his voice dropping out of nervous habit, gaze slipping away from her to watch the moonlight as it settled into the depths of the canal below. He tensed and jerked his eyes to hers when he felt her fingertips against his chin; she raised his head with one hand while the other flicked spent ash over the flowers' petals.

"Your family is not the only one filled with cruelties."

Her touch left him but he felt it lingering against his skin; he nodded, watching as she turned again to look over the city. Tentatively he reached for her and placed a trembling palm against her shoulder blade, where he had held her when they danced. He felt her tense as he drew close. Again his throat seized upon the words he tried to speak, shattering them into noise.

"I had—I had hoped that you might see me as someone who could be a—a companion to you. To—bear you through the days." His voice was uneven, breaking, the sounds catching and tumbling as he spoke, stumbling across the lines he had fixed in his mind across the years he had thought of her, those long, desirous years since they had met. She shifted beneath his hand, turning to look at him, her face drawn, half-gaunt with grief, her eyes wide and luminous as she watched him. His hand fell away as if he no longer had the strength to keep it raised; his eyes, too, fell, unable to hold her gaze. His confession came as a whisper among the overwhelming fragrance of the flowers.

"When you came to Pendleton Hall you—you filled my life with colour. You lit the whole of Dunwall."

He forced himself to raise his eyes. Not one muscle of her face stirred, but she let out a long, extinguished sigh.

"Oh, Treavor," she said at length, her voice threaded with sadness even as she pressed the hissing end of her cigarette into the centre of one of Esma's flowers. Its petals curled over the burn, the scent of smoke and roses wafting from its burning core. "Someone should _love_ you. Someone should _kiss_ you."

"I—"

Her lips were cold, firm, stoppering the incessant movement of his own as he trembled against her, his face flushed and burning as she kissed with slow, measured grace against the corner of his mouth; she turned his head with her hand and parted his lips and kissed him again, her breath breaking against his cheeks, her hands cradling his head as though she bit into an unripe fruit. Her mouth tasted of wine and tobacco and, behind that, the bite of whiskey that made her tongue loll against his. At the touch of her fingers to his cheek, his flesh blighted by her exquisite cold, he dragged his hands to her waist and pulled her firmly against his lean and lanky body, the layers of their fine clothing rustling together, and the hum in her throat sounding with the piteous decrescendo of a sob.

He drew back with salt on his tongue. Cheeks glistening, she looked to him with red-lined eyes. Her fingers grasped loosely at his collar and he took them in his hands, kissing at her knuckles with feverish intensity matched by the hard pace of his heart.

"I can take you away from here," he said against her skin, her fingers smelling of tobacco, "we can escape Dunwall together."

She only stared, frozen as all of Treavor's hopes washed around her like a wave breaking against a rocky shore. He whispered them against her neck, tangled them in her hair, pinned them against her wan cheeks with his kisses; her tears washed away. He held her in his arms with the excited urgency of all his promises to her, all his arrangements to which she acquiesced in her silence. She opened her mouth as if to speak but only smiled, weakly, as she looked into his wide-set eyes and he, in their reflective surface, saw himself.

"Waverly."

Morgan's voice, heavy and unctuous, slipped into the space between them. Spurred to movement, Waverly stepped back, one hand rising to coyly cover her face, while Treavor jolted around to face his older brother who stood with a thin-lipped frown by the door.

"This is a _private_ conver—"

"I just thought the lady should _know_," Morgan said, his voice raised to silence his brother, "that her fiancé has arrived and is _looking_ for her." He turned, now, to Waverly, who stared back with those impassive eyes, like a lake frozen over with a crust of hard ice. He smiled, and gave her a bow, low and obsequious. His eyes slid from Treavor back to her. "You should not be lingering on the balcony."

"No," she said, and to Treavor's ears her voice echoed as though spoken from some hollow place, far away. "You're right, of course, Lord Pendleton. Excuse me."

She turned from him. Unsteadily she crossed back into the hall of her family's home on a drift of fallen petals, passing away behind the heavy curtains to leave him among the rotten scent of roses that twined the balcony with their baleful vines. She did not look at him.

"Poor Waverly," Morgan said, clapping a hand on his younger brother's shoulder; Treavor nearly crumpled beneath its weight. "Esma's reputation was _long_ ruined and Lydia, well—she can't be made to do anything she doesn't want to do, can she? So it's all left to little Waverly to preserve her family name. She'll be married within the month."

"You knew?" Treavor said, his voice quavering. His blood, which had run so cold, now rose sharply to his face. "You _knew!_"

"Please, Treavor, I didn't think she would actually dance with you. I didn't expect her to be that heartless." Morgan snapped, dragging a cigarette from its case in his inner pocket, lighting it at his lips.

"She isn't heartless." Treavor answered, his voice sharp. Morgan gave a snort of laughter.

"She's playing with you. I know what that looks like."

"She isn't—"

"You're acting like a fool!" He jabbed a pointed finger at his brother, the cigarette's burning end coming close; Treavor flinched and jumped back. "Like a little boy. You're _embarrassing_ the family."

Treavor looked to him, his eyes drawn and watery, his shoulders trembling as he tried to twist back the pained cry that pinched hard at his viscera and wrapped around his tongue. Morgan gave a short breath, a bark of exasperation, as he dragged up Treavor's limp hand and put his burning cigarette between his brother's fingers.

"Calm down." He watched with black eyes as Treavor dragged in a stuttering lungful of smoke. Morgan braced himself against the balcony, gazing out over the city. Treavor looked, too; the clocktower rose up, gleaming by the light of the heavy moon that slung low, now, against the black and jagged horizon. He saw her—her cheeks glittering with her inexplicable sadness, clasped to his sunken chest, all the promise of hope that she had given him. He clenched his jaw, swallowing back the knot that grasped his throat. Defiantly, he snubbed the cigarette against the balustrade.

"She isn't _playing_ with me. You don't understand, you weren't—"

"Did she mention Esma's roses?" Morgan said loudly, turning to the knot of flowers that spilled over the edge of the balustrade. Treavor gripped the cigarette tightly between his fingertips, his drawn face pinching in confusion.

"What?"

"They look like such fragile things," Morgan continued, reaching to drag a fingertip across one velvety petal. He smiled that long, lazy grin which Treavor had always found obscene. "They bruise easily and wilt in the sunlight—they'll be dead by the Month of Earth. Every aspect of their being makes _demands_—be gentle, be tender, be careful. Pity the short-lived rose whose flowers are too heavy for their little stems. But look."

He twisted up the flower by its fawning calyx to reveal a row of three-inch thorns that grew in measured succession along its thin, twisting vine.

"They bite."

Treavor shook his head furiously, placing the back of his hand to his burning forehead. Her eyes had been like mirrors; he could not see behind them.

"I don't care—I don't!" Treavor said with a flash of anger, "why do you have to ruin everything I have—why do you have to take it away!"

All the roses that lined the balcony would die within a month and leave nothing but wicked brambles, their sweet, alluring flowers withering in the day. All his promises, whispered against her cheek as she shivered, caught in his arms, would die with them. He shut his eyes to the sight as his older brother released the flower's stem and it fell back into its shape, hanging lower, now, after Morgan's violence to the vine. When he opened his eyes he saw that he was regarded with an almost exasperated sympathy—a look of pity he had never seen on the twins' face. Treavor's shoulders slumped, his head bowed; Waverly's chill, exquisite fingers would not lift his eyes again.

"Do you think she feels anything for me?" Treavor asked in a pained and distant tremor. Morgan looked away, staring back through the windows of the manor, where the music drifted softly to them with the scintillating light of the oil lamps. He sighed, and lit himself another cigarette.

"I don't think she feels anything at all."

It was delivered as an ultimatum, but when Treavor raised a hand to his mouth and passed his tongue over his cracked lips he tasted the last remnant of Waverly's tears that had pressed to him when she, in her inscrutable grief, had kissed him. He did not know what was the better lie; he leaned against the balustrade with his head in his hands.

"I'll have a servant fetch us wine," Morgan said as he straightened and disappeared into the house, and left Treavor among the grotesque integument of roses that swallowed up everything they touched.

7


End file.
